Forescout’s Perspective on The Forrester Wave™: Operational Technology Security Solutions, Q3 2026
One could argue that the biggest message from this Forrester Wave report is that the market has reached its next phase.
The first phase of OT security was asset discovery.
The second phase was threat detection.
And we’re now entering phase three: operational risk reduction.
For years, OT security has been defined by visibility. Could you discover industrial assets? Could you classify them correctly? Could you identify vulnerabilities and watch for suspicious activity?
OT environments are increasingly attractive targets, a fact quantified by Forescout Research – Vedere Labs which found that attacks using OT protocols surged by 84% in 2025.
Security leaders are no longer asking, “What do I have?”. They’re asking, “Which risks matter most, what should I do about them, and how do I reduce exposure without disrupting operations?”. They face pressure from executive leadership, boards, regulators, and cyber insurers to demonstrate measurable reduction of risk. Fortunately, that’s where OT security is headed.
Forescout is proud to be in this Forrester evaluation among 10 other vendors.
OT Security Is Becoming Operational Risk Management
One of the themes that stood out in this year’s evaluation is the emphasis on risk prioritization. Forrester’s evaluation puts significant weight on Risk Modeling and Exposure Prioritization, recognizing that OT teams need context over data by itself.
Industrial organizations are drowning in alerts, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and exposure data. The challenge isn’t finding risk; they’re surrounded by it. They need to be able to quickly assess which issues will impact production, safety, reliability, or business continuity.
In the Forrester blog, “OT Security’s Next Chapter Starts When Asset Discovery Stops Being the Goal”, the research firm explains:
“Due to the nature of device types, operations requirements, connectivity constraints, and safety protocols, industrial environments often contain large volumes of vulnerabilities, exposures, threats, and operational concerns. The challenge is rarely identifying issues but rather determining which issues create meaningful business risk.”
OT environments are often heavily comprised of unmanaged, un-agentable devices, making a patching strategy largely impossible. They can’t segment everything overnight. They can’t shut down production every time a new vulnerability appears. They need to understand the risks with meaningful operational consequences and the actions with the greatest impact.
The result? Making risk prioritization, containment, and control the center of modern OT security programs.
Action Is a Differentiator
Another takeaway from the report is that the market is moving beyond monitoring and detection. For years, organizations purchased OT security products to gain visibility into unmanaged environments, so most have some degree of visibility.
Now they want their OT security platform to proactively reduce risk. That means things like enforcing policy, controlling remote access, and applying secure network segmentation.
“One notable finding from this evaluation is that asset discovery is no longer a key differentiator among leading OT security solution providers,” writes Paddy Harrington of Forrester from the the same blog. “Most providers now deliver solid visibility and asset identification capabilities. There are varying degrees of what they provide for asset discovery, but similar to endpoint security and antimalware capabilities, this is just one component of the complete stack that they offer, such as vulnerability and risk management, network segmentation, or secure access management.”
The Forrester blog continues: “The more important question for buyers is what happens after those OT assets are discovered.”
It also means improving remediation. To accomplish that, security insights have to connect to operational work. And with AI adoption by nation states and cybercriminals, your defense now needs to perform at machine-speed against autonomous attacks.
The Importance of IT/OT Convergence. No, really.
Industrial organizations don’t operate in isolated silos anymore. The same business processes, users, devices, suppliers, and applications increasingly span both enterprise and operational environments.
CISOs may not own the OT environment but many of them are accountable for security breaches across the entirety of their organizations. That requires a breadth of focus as they pursue Zero Trust initiatives, secure remote access programs, AI adoption, and broader digital transformation efforts.
Reporting Needs to Align with Business Outcomes
If organizations can’t explain operational risk clearly, they struggle to get funding, drive change, or prioritize remediation efforts.
The best OT security programs translate technical findings into business outcomes. They help leadership understand not just that risk exists, but what that risk means to operations, revenue, production, safety, and resilience.
That capability becomes increasingly important as regulatory requirements continue to expand globally.
Weighing OT Security Capabilities
The ability to identify risk is important. The ability to determine which risks require action is what ultimately helps organizations improve security outcomes.
The report also highlights the growing importance of segmentation, secure access, and incident response. These operational capabilities help organizations to, ultimately, improve overall resilience.
How? Enforce policy. Control access to critical systems. Contain threats.
Taken together, this year’s weighting tells an important story: OT security is maturing from an asset discovery issue into an operational risk-reduction discipline.
Forescout Vistaro™: From Visibilty to Outcomes
As industrial organizations look beyond visibility and inventory management, they need a way to connect cyber risk to operational impact and take action without disrupting production: visibility is essential, but outcomes are what matter.
The Forescout Vistaro™ platform helps organizations move from identifying risk to reducing it by combining comprehensive asset intelligence with risk prioritization, including secure remote access, network segmentation, policy enforcement, and remediation capabilities. We help organizations reduce operational risk across IT, IoT, IoMT, and OT environments. With the platform, OT security is not a separate discipline. It helps organizations manage risk consistently across interconnected environments.
Forescout’s Value to Customers
As organizations continue to grapple with growing complexity, AI will play an increasingly important role. Innovations such as Forescout VistaroAI™ are helping customers cut through complexity by turning vast amounts of asset, exposure, and threat data into actionable insights. The goal is not simply to provide more information; it’s to help teams make better decisions, faster.
Visibility is table stakes. The next wave of OT security leaders will be defined by how effectively they reduce risk, improve resilience, and empower the business to operate with confidence.
Forescout is included among the 11 total vendors in this evaluation.
Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here.